Teaching Question Generation

The September issue of Educational Leadership (ASCD) is devoted to the topic of using questioning for learning. If you are a member of ASCD, you can access all of the articles in that issue, but for those of you who are not members, there are several good pieces that are available to the general public:

• How to Make Your Questions Essential by Grant Wiggins and Denise Wilbur: presents seven ways to generate quality, essential questions.
• Let’s Switch Questioning Around by Chris Tovani: provides suggestions for teaching students how to generate questions.
• Making Questions Flow by Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana and Andrew P. Minigan: also provides suggestions for teaching students how to generate questions.

Question generation by students is one of the four comprehension strategy activities in The Key Comprehension Routine. Teachers who participate in professional development for this program learn how to teach students how to generate a question at every level of Bloom’s Taxonomy about anything they learn in class that is read, said, or done. Click below to download a set of question terms and prompts from this program.

• Question terms
• Question prompts